It’s because nobody else seems to care about this kind of crap. Why aren’t the Catholic and Episcopal Bishops of the US speaking out against this obscene kind of totalitarian warping of Christianity?

UPDATE: Blast – this video has been taken down by HBO. Never mind; you can check out the material discussed by Bill Maher and his guest, Jeff Sharlet, at Jeff’s website.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 1st, 2009 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Atheism, Religion, Stupidity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

It has been common among religious believers to look with misgiving at atheists and agnostics, and to think that they are mistaken; however, in many instances the opposite is the truth; some religious beliefs are not just irrelevant, but baseless. The â€œGodâ€ of main line traditions simply does not exist. I accepted the challenge of finding the One who may be recognized even by agnostics and atheists: the Existence itself. The God of religions may be denied, but nobody can deny that the Existence is. It doesnâ€™t matter how you call it, but â€œAll-That-Is,â€ is. A book (probably not written for you) â€œChristianity Reformed From ist Rootsâ€ tells all; perhaps its reflections will relieve your friends of the illusion, as they did for me. (Amazon.com).

Here’s the problem, Jairo: what do you mean by “finding Existence”? Why capitalize it? If you mean discovering all that there is no know about the natural world, then science is the tool you need: it has demonstrated unequalled power over the centuries. But from the way you refer to “Existence”, you seem to refer to something more than the natural world. And if you are a supernaturalist, then you have exactly the same burden of proof as traditional religionists.

The natural world is made up of elementary particles and forces, assembled and interacting in various ways. At the atomic level, the interactions and assemblies are the result of what we term the laws of physics, which is simply our name for the regular patterns which we see. At the level of physical matter, the interactions are based on chemistry, which we can (with a lot of hard work) reduce to physics. Chance combinations coupled with natural selection have resulted in chemical assemblies which are capable of information processing, and in which the information encoded in the chemical patterns controls high-level structural patterns and interactions. The simplest of these are things like bacteria and single-celled organisms; the most sophisticated that we know of (in our local part of space, at this particular moment of time) are mammals, including humans. There will, doubtless, be others, in other places and at other times.

And that’s all. There’s nothing that suggests – much less requires – supernatural agency in existence (or “Existence”, if you prefer).

Why did I bother to write all this? Well, there was a tell-tale word in your comment. You wrote “finding the One who may be recognized even by agnostics and atheists”. That little word, “who”, carries all kinds of assumptions. Referring to existence as “who” is rooted in the same atavistic impulse that saw natural phenomena as caused by deities and demons, that viewed schizophrenia as demonic possession.